The Window manager was the one of the most important parts of the User Interface toolbox, and the ultimate showcase for Quickdraw's "region clipping" technology. The window manager had to calculate various regions for windows as they were created, moved and resized, and objects drawn inside the windows were automatically clipped as necessary.

The Macintosh window manager was based on the one that Bill Atkinson wrote for Lisa, which was written in Pascal; my job was to rewrite it in 68000 assembly language and adapt it to the Macintosh environment. The first step was to port Bill's Pascal version. I wrote a little program to test the port, which I called "Window Manager Demo", that generated some windows and put the window manager through its paces.

A year earlier, I had written a fast "ball bouncing" routine, using custom, 16x16 pixel graphics routines, that could animate hundreds of balls simultaneously, which was a fun way to show off the Mac's raw graphical horsepower. I decided to animate a few dozen balls in each window in the window manager demo, using Quickdraw, because their continuous movement would eventually cover all the bases inside a window and expose any flaws in the underlying clipping.

After Susan started in January 1983, I asked her to draw some tiny 16 by 16 bitmaps to use in the Window Manager Demo instead of the by now monotonous ball shapes. Soon, we had a variety of little objects bouncing around in the various windows, like tiny little Macintoshes, or apples, insects and alligators. I thought that the Window Manager Demo was finished, but I was wrong.

Steve Jobs came by the software area one evening a couple of months later, excited about someone he had recently met in New York City. "Hey, I want you to do a demo next week for this guy I met yesterday, John Sculley, he's the president of Pepsi. He's really smart - you wouldn't believe how smart he is. If we impress him, we can get Pepsi to buy thousands of Macs. Maybe even five thousand. Why don't you try to come up with something special to show him?".

It sounded a little bit fishy to me, since we hardly ever demoed to potential customers at that point. But I asked Susan to draw some Pepsi imagery, and she came up with tiny little Pepsi caps, as well as Pespi cans, in his honor, so I put them into the Window Manager demo.

The next week, Mike Murray led John Sculley around the engineering area, since Steve was out of town. He brought him by my cubicle to see the modified Window Manager demo. I opened the windows one at a time, saving the Pepsi caps and cans for last. He seemed genuinely excited to see the Pepsi stuff, but oddly cold for most of the demo. He asked a few questions, but he didn't seem all that interested in the answers.

A few weeks later, we found out the real story - the purpose of John's visit was to interview for CEO of Apple, and he got the job, being convinced by Steve's famous line "Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life, or would you like a chance to change the world?".

Andy,
I really like your Folklore site, and the software that creates it. You have done a wonderful job.
Jim Armstrong

from Pete Gontier on January 28, 2004 20:17:27

One interesting factoid about this little app is that it still runs well on Mac OS X. Granted, it's running within the 68K emulation environment of the Mac OS 9 emulation environment, and it doesn't run flawlessly, but it does run very well considering its age.

from Nate Friedman on March 20, 2004 05:35:57

i'd like to see that app run on a 'modern machine' if you'd be willing to release it to the public :)

from David Craig on April 14, 2004 03:40:23

There was another Pepsi-Apple connection involving the Apple Lisa computer. After's Sculley's arrival at Apple, the Lisa 2 model was created and was given the internal code name of "Pepsi". There were even Pepsi buttons created by Apple with the Pepsi logo with "Lisa" printed in the middle. I have one of these (thanks to Chris McFall, one of the Lisa operating system team members).
I also just noticed that the Macintosh icons in the "Macs" window look like they have a slot for the 5.25" disk drive. I believe up until the end of 1983 that the Mac's internal drive was 5.25" in size, either the Apple II variety of 140KB or the Twiggy variety of 860KB.
-David T Craig

from Darryl Oliver on November 08, 2004 20:05:12

I did a search on "sugar water" and got no hits. I couldn't believe there were no stories about the famous quote, and found this entry after searching on "Sculley." Is this the only reference to Sculley's interview on the site?

from Scott Sibert on October 20, 2005 14:08:39

Did Steve know the purpose of Sculley's visit (interviewing to be CEO of Apple) beforehand?

from Don Jaksa on July 25, 2006 17:05:15

I have this demo. It is facinating to know it was around in 1982. It is the earliest piece of Macintosh software I have in my collection. I'm not sure how I came to have the Pepsi demo, but I collect all things early Macintosh and any single sided diskettes I can find.